“The court accordingly rose to allow arrangements to be made. An associate took the judge’s closed laptop through to her room but, unbeknownst to the judge, the remote link to the court room remained open. The judge was therefore overheard having a private conversation on the telephone with her clerk about the Appellant by a number of people who still remained on the call. During the course of that conversation, the judge’s frustration at what represented a further delay in a case which was already substantially overrunning its three week time estimate, manifested itself in a number of pejorative comments made by her about the Appellant including that she was pretending to have a cough and was trying ‘every trick in the book’ in order to avoid answering difficult questions….” (at [7] – [8]).
The above error did not happen in Australia, fortunately. The trial judge refused an application for recusal, but an appeal against that decision was allowed.
C (A Child) [2020] EWCA Civ 987 (on Bailii).